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Friday, December 4, 2015

Day 64: Graphing using y=mx+b and Sequence Sorting (Graphing Monday)

Students from 2nd through 5th period should revise their first draft of their blog post and have it published using the button at the top right of the blog where it says Send a tweet. Please send a tweet with a link to whose ever blog you commented on so I can evaluate that.

Today's estimation was how many times would you have to fill and refill the small vase to fill the large vase. For some reason half my 2nd period students thought I meant how many of the actual small vase could fit in... I adjusted my wording on the board. A lot of students estimated between 7 and up to 30. I like that the answer was not a whole number, so I will be seeing how students dealt with the decimal. I was in a hurry so did not calculate percent error with students because they needed 15 minutes for their assessment to conclude class.

Students reviewed what rules they wrote for graphs d, e, and f. They then told me how it grew and the number of tiles in Figure 0 and how that helped them write a rule in y=mx+b form. Then I instructed students to setup a coordinate plane and graph y=4x+3 and y=3x with y=-2x+8 and y=x-1 on another graph. I picked students and volunteers to graph them with Expo marker on the laminated posters from the Algebra walk the first week of school. This was great to revisit a concept and see how graphing themselves as multiple points was the same and different from the new method of graphing the number of tiles in Figure 0 and then using the m or growth factor to find a second point. This goes hand in hand with students blog posts currently at the @joycemathletes Twitter account.

In accelerated students looked at a sequence that was multiplying by 3 each time, which was when the bunny problem was going from 2 bunnies, to 6, then 18, 54 and so on. I liked how students showed off their mental math skills by getting 162 then 486.

Then I passed out the sequences for students to sort. A lot of students figured out the Fibonacci sequence and they all had trouble with the same one that took me a bit of time to process when I had encountered it. Students sorted into groupings. One group sorted a group as +2, divide by 2, and times 2. Others sorted by multiplying and dividing, which they associated with exponential growth and decay from the previous days. A student described how one sequence relied on the previous term to get the next one. This is leading into some topics I look forward to exploring with them.

And I picked up a Christmas tree on the way home from work! This is obviously pre ornaments and lights but here we go holidays.